Smugness
Jim Manney of Loyola Press has an interesting blog called People of the Book, which focuses on Catholic book publishing. He has a recent post about a new book by Jeremy Driscoll, OSB entitled A Monk’s Alphabet: Moments of Stillness in a Turning World. Here is an excerpt:
God so hates religious smugness and self-satisfaction and the
certainty that the other is a sinner and will go to hell that he would
empty hell completely of the sinners who deservedly belong there and
place the smug one there all alone to pass an eternity of painful
astonishment, learning that God has mercy on whom he will. Should some
faint sense of desiring to adore the One who is so merciful crack even
slightly the bitterness of this terribly misused virtuous one, maybe
then even hell would be emptied of him.
In short, it is not for me to judge, not for me to presume to
pronounce on others. ‘The last shall be first, and the first last.’
What a great quote with this weekend’s scriptures!
Part of the the problem is that most of us(as the author cited ib\ndicates) is that we need too contemplate in busy worlds, wher arrogance and smugness cause such great consternations.
I suspect Luke 9 would be agreat reading dfor all of us on this blog, including yours truly
Can one be smug about not being smug? Can one be smug about not being smug about being smug? There seem to be the possibility of an infinite regress here?
Another facet of smugness is when people rally around St. Paul’s comment about being the worst of sinners.
“No, I am.”
“Oh, no. Forgive me, I am.”
Yo! If you’re a messy sinner, go get cleaned up in the confessional rather than showing everyone the dirt on your hands!
It’s a strange type of arguing amongst each other about being the greatest, as presented within last Sunday’s Gospel.
It seems to me that smugness is one of the bitter fruits of comparing oneself with others. There are other bitter fruits, depending upon where one senses one stacks up — despair, discouragement, etc.
Is it the spirit of self-comparison that is the root problem? We benchmark every aspect of ourselves in this society, from IQ to income to blood pressure. I guess it’s hard not to keep benchmarking when it comes to the spiritual life.
Certainly one can be smug about not being smug. Alternatively, one can try not to be smug and keep quiet about it.
My construction of the infinite series was wrong. It should be: I am smug about not being smug about not being smug ad infinitum. The good news there may be that since no one can complete the series, no one can be smug to that extent.
I tend to agree with Cathy Kaveny that comparison with others is the beginning of smugness as well as of other not terribly desirable outcomes. Or at least it may be. But smugness is nothing other than satisfaction with oneself and perhaps the ultimate in egocentricity or perhaps I should say egomania is a self-satisfaction that prescinds from any comparison with others because one has no interest in or feels no need for comparison with anyone else. But this is probably a state of pseudo-achievement that, fortunately, one can only pretend to have reached.
I was just reading this passage from Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters, p. 4, and it leapt off the page as a comment on smugness.
“Love begins and ends in equality. In a sense to love is just to see the equality of another. Love can coexist for a while within structures of hierarchy, of superiors and inferiors, but in the end it corrodes and subverts them precisely because its drive is always toward equality. Now obviously I am using ‘equality’ here in a very special sense: people who love each other do not have to be exactly equal in height, or in IQ, but they have discovered an equality that makes all such differences irrelevant. And because the differences are irrelevant, they will, if they are man-made, finally disappear. That is why love is slowely corrosive of hierarchy, and vice versa.”
Where there is love, there can be no smugness.
True story.
While on retreat in January, I talked with the wonderful Jesuit who was leading it. I told him that I felt that I was just too self-satisfied (aka smug). He said: You’re not going to change. Just live with it and pray for mercy.” I still have to pray, I’m sorry to say.
I think there’s a cognitive side to smugness, too. Smugness may manifest itself as a condescending or judgmental attitude toward others, but this attitude is usually rooted in an unwarranted sense of certitude about something (perhaps even about everything in extreme cases!). This happens when we fail to live in awareness of the boundless complexity and depth of even the most ordinary situations. With this awareness, humility about what we “know” is inescapable. With this humility, smugness has no soil to take root in.
Unfortunately, Catholic discourse frequently seems given to dueling oversimplifications, even about inherently complex situations –and even in an excellent magazine like Commonweal. Oversimplification leads to false certitudes, which lead almost invariably to overt or passive smugness. We might be a lot less smug if we lived a healthy respect for the complexity (and wonder!) of the real world.
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